But if speaking about the issue. Why Mozilla even need so much control over extensions? Seems like they built an infrastructure to be able to disable any installed extension remotely. That's just evil.

As opposed to what? How do you test for all that with manual updates, as an individual or a small organization? Even for a huge organization which reviews most of the updates it installs, critical updates should be applied immediately, to avoid the lag.

The auto-update mechanism exists almost exclusively for the benefit of Windows users. None of the Linux distros use it.

Like for example you could make it so the script to be run when a browser encounters a pdf file is put directly in the settings. Thus changing that setting changes what the browser does—you can add, remove or change an in-browser pdf viewer that way.

It’s not what Normandy currently does, but it is something it’s at least theoretically capable of. And hitting that extreme would, in my opinion, made it reasonable to start calling it SaaS.

It may come across as a nasty dark pattern if a user must opt out of auto-updates (which is loosely what Normandy is, if you extend “auto-update” to also mean tacit enrollment in an experiment).

Instead it should be off by default, with a clear and unambiguous description of the functionality on a menu page if a user wants to opt in.

For example, I am a very privacy-focused browser user, relying on many special settings & extensions. Despite frequently reading about browser updates, I had no idea Normandy functioned like this, nor that it was enabled by default, until reading into this current Firefox certificate bug.

Upon learning what Normandy is and that it is opt-out by default with unclear connections to the traditional privacy dropdown menus to disable experiments or usage stat sharing, I feel that Mozilla violated my trust in a profound and deeply upsetting way.

Typically, a user has to click the installer or use package manager or something to get the update, it’s their decision they make locally. If a setting is in place where this decision can be made somewhere else, it’s now a remote thing, a remote update. Quite useful thing in some cases and one of the things that make SaaS possible in the first place.

There should be exactly zero change to it UNLESS I said so, because I am admin of my machines - not someone from Mozilla, nor Microsoft, nor Apple. Is it that hard to understand?

And stop talking about "owning" anything, you clearly do not understand ownership rights - your idea of it does not apply to whole world AND this is not USA.

I'm too old for this "word plays". It seems like there is a need to pay someone, to not listen to mozilla and finally strip firefox from it's newly introduced "features".